‘The Music of Stones’ and other poems by Colette Colfer

Stepping Stones

Here are my hands, outstretched for your bare feet so that each step of your path through darkness and gravel bits splintered with thorns will meet uncalloused palms of moccasin softness. This is your extraordinary journey beyond mapped landscape and into unknowns but my knuckles will jigsaw rocks like keys filling locks to smooth roughness for your soles. My hands will be luminous with love light anticipating your transformation, pulsating warmth for this your longest night when each footstep is a destination. Although you are alone you’re not alone, I’m reaching out my hands as stepping-stones.

Anchors

I search shorelines at low tide for portals that open time to the pip of it. Fingers like a blind man’s on stones, periwinkles, chainies, and drops of smooth blue-glass on sand. I trace cat-gut through seaweed to hidden hooks on feathers, German baits, spoons and spinners. Each rock a prayer bead in the litany of belonging. Pock-air, Connigeer, Shollister, Claim.

Worms

The graveyard was January grey and cold. Dad was crying. I’d never seen him cry before. Strangers spilled over mounds and dips, around jaded headstones that tilted towards sleep. Grandad was lying in a fresh coffin with brassy handles that glinted like baubles. I stood in my little girl knees at the frontline by the open hole that gasped for closure. A priest’s ragged voice led the chorus of mourners in prayers that lifted up into the sky like birds. Men used ropes to slowly lower the coffin till it was anchored deep and still on the black. Some one of them broke the shadowy silence with the thud of a shovelful of clay on wood. Nanna turned her back, took broken steps away, my two sisters at her sides like crutches. There would be worms now on Grandad’s face and clothes, wriggling over his eyelids, into his ears, up his nose. Afterwards, in a carful of adults who laughed and told stories, I stared at the hedges so the whole world blurred green.

The Music of Stones

We tuned ourselves to skylark song and searched the skies all summer for their high hovering spots where birds trilled like semi-quavers in the unlined stave of a hot blue sky. We paused to stare, enthralled by dives that spliced our days. Then satisfied we’d amble on through sunburnt fields beside the sea towards the lighthouse, stopping at the next birdsong. All summer that summer we spied on skylarks, climbed cliffs, found caves, swam skinny dips and lay naked on reclusive sandy beaches where you taught me that even stones can sing.

Colette Colfer works as a part-time lecturer in world religions at Waterford Institute of Technology. She has also worked for many years in journalism and is an award winning radio documentary maker. She has had poems published in Poetry Ireland Review, The Caterpillar (for kids), Skylight 47, The Poets’ Republic, Three Drops From a Cauldron and Algebra of Owls.